Semantic event detection for digital content records

ABSTRACT

A system and method for semantic event detection in digital image content records is provided in which an event-level “Bag-of-Features” (BOF) representation is used to model events, and generic semantic events are detected in a concept space instead of an original low-level visual feature space based on the BOF representation.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

The present application is based on, and claims priority from, U.S. Provisional Application 61/058,201 filed Jun. 2, 2008, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The invention relates to categorizing digital content records, such as digital still images or video. In particular, the invention relates to categorizing digital content records based on the detection of semantic events.

BACKGROUND

The advent of low cost electronic consumer imaging technology has resulted in a significant increase in the number of digital images captured by the average consumer. Indeed, as various forms of electronic memory have become increasingly less expensive over time, consumers have had a tendency to take even more digital still images and videos, as well as retain digital still images and videos they would have previously discarded. As a result, the average consumer is faced with an increasingly difficult problem in properly identifying and cataloging digital images for storage and later retrieval. In general, such identification and cataloging is usually performed manually, which can be an extremely time consuming process for the consumer.

As just one illustration, a consumer may travel to a number of different locations during the course of a vacation. The consumer may take images at each of the specific locations, as well as images at each of the locations that are related to other subject categories or events. For example, the consumer may take images of family members at each of the locations, images of specific events at each of the locations, and images of historical buildings at each of the locations. Upon return from travel, the consumer may desire to sort the digital images based on various groupings such as persons, birthdays, museums, etc., and to store the digital images based on the groupings in an electronic album. The consumer is currently faced with manually sorting through hundreds of digital still images and video segments in order to identify them with specific events.

In view of the above, automatic albuming of consumer photos and videos has gained a great deal of interest in recent years. One popular approach to automatic albuming is to organize digital images and videos according to events by chronological order and by visual similarities in image content. For example, A. C. Loui and A. Savakis, “Automated event clustering and quality screening of consumer pictures for digital albuming,” IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, 5(3):390-402, 2003, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference, discusses how a group of digital images can be automatically clustered into events.

While basic clustering of images can group images that appear to be related to a single event, it would be desirable to be able to tag semantic meanings to the clustered events in order to improve the automatic albuming process. Semantic event detection, however, presents basic problems: first, a practical system needs to be able to process digital still images and videos simultaneously, as both often exist in real consumer image collections; second, a practical system needs to accommodate the diverse semantic content in real consumer collections, thereby making it desirable to provide a system that incorporates generic methods for detecting different semantic events instead of specific individual methods for detecting each specific semantic event; finally, a practical system needs to be robust to prevent errors in identification and classification.

SUMMARY

The invention provides a system and method for semantic event detection in digital image content records. Specifically, an event-level “Bag-of-Features” (BOF) representation is used to model events, and generic semantic events are detected in a concept space instead of an original low-level visual feature space based on the BOF representation.

In a preferred embodiment, an event-level representation is developed where each event is modeled by a BOF feature vector based on which semantic event detectors are directly built. Compared with a simplistic approach where image-level feature vectors are used for training classifiers, the present invention is more robust to the difficult images or mistakenly organized images within events. For example, in any given event, some images may be difficult to classify. These difficult images usually make the decision boundary complex and hard to model. By adopting the event-level feature representation, one is able to avoid the sensitivity problem by decreasing the influence of difficult or erroneous digital still images and videos segments in measuring event-level similarities. As will be shown, good detection performance can be achieved with a small number of support vectors for Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers, i.e., the classification problem can be significantly simplified by the event-level representation.

In a preferred embodiment, a method for facilitating semantic event classification of a group of image records related to an event is provided that includes extracting a plurality of visual features from each of the image records, generating a plurality of concept scores for each of the image records using the visual features, wherein each concept score corresponds to a visual concept and each concept score is indicative of a probability that the image record includes the visual concept, generating a feature vector corresponding to the event based on the concept scores of the image records, and supplying the feature vector to an event classifier that identifies at least one semantic event classifier that corresponds to the event.

The image records may include at least one digital still image and at least one video segment. Accordingly, the system is capable of handling real life consumer image datasets that normally contain both digital still images and video segments.

The extracting of the plurality of visual features includes extracting a keyframe from the video segment and extracting the plurality of visual features from both the keyframe and the digital still image. Initial concept scores are then generated for each keyframe and each digital still image corresponding to each of the extracted visual features. Ensemble concept scores are then preferably generated for each keyframe and each digital still image based on the initial concept scores

The ensemble concept scores are preferably generated by fusing the individual concept scores for each extracted visual feature for a given keyframe or a given digital still image.

Once a semantic event classifier is identified, the digital still images and video segments can be tagged to facilitate proper sorting, storage and retrieval of the images and video segments.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The invention will be described with reference to certain preferred embodiments thereof and the accompanying drawings, wherein:

FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram of a semantic event detection system in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram illustrating processing modules utilized by the semantic event detection system illustrated in FIG. 1;

FIG. 3 is a flow diagram illustrating processing modules utilized by to train the system illustrated in FIG. 1 for semantic event detection;

FIG. 4 is a flow diagram illustrating processing modules utilized to train concept detectors employed in the system illustrated in FIG. 1;

FIG. 5 is a table illustrating different semantic events used in a test process and including their detailed definitions;

FIG. 6 is a graph illustrating a comparison the results of the system illustrated in FIG. 1 with a convention approach where the BOF feature vectors are constructed based on original low-level visual features;

FIG. 7 is a graph comparing the results of the present invention with a baseline event detector and an SVM detector using image-level concept score representation directly (SVM-Direct); and

FIG. 8 is a graph comparing the number of support vectors required by the present invention compared with the SVM-Direct method.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

Complex semantic events are usually generated by the concurrences of elementary visual concepts. For example, “wedding” is a semantic event associated with visual concepts such as “people”, “flowers”, “park”, etc., evolving with a certain pattern. In general, a visual concept can be defined as an image-content characteristic of an image, and are usually semantically represented by words that are broader than the words used to identify a specific event. Accordingly, the visual concepts form a subset of image-content characteristics that can be contributed to a specific event.

In the present invention, elementary visual concepts are first detected from images, and semantic event detectors are built in the concept space instead of in the original low-level feature space. Benefits from such an approach include at least two aspects. First, visual concepts are higher-level and more intuitive descriptors than original low-level features. As described in S. Ebadollahi et al., “Visual event detection using multi-dimensional concept dynamics,” IEEE ICME, 2006, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference, concept scores are powerful to model semantic events. Second, the concept space in the present invention is preferably formed by semantic concept detectors, as described for example in S. F. Chang et al., “Multimodal semantic concept detection for consumer video benchmark,” ACM MIR, 2007, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference, trained over a known consumer electronic image dataset of the type described, for example, A. C. Loui et al., “Kodak consumer video benchmark data set: concept definition and annotation,” ACM MIR, 2007, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference. These semantic concept detectors play the important role of incorporating additional information from a previous image dataset to help detect semantic events in a current image dataset.

Assuming, for example, that the above-described dataset includes digital still images and video segments from real consumers, it is desirable that the entire dataset first be partitioned into a set of macro-events, and each macro-event be further partitioned into a set of events. The partition is preferably based on the capture time of each digital still image of video segment and the color similarity between them, by using the previously developed event clustering algorithm described above. For example, letting E_(t) denote the t-th event which contains m_(p) ^(t) photos and m_(v) ^(t) videos. I_(i) ^(t) and V_(j) ^(t) denote the i-th photo and j-th video in E_(t). Although images can be grouped or clustered into events utilizing this algorithm, the events themselves are not identified or associated with semantic meanings. Accordingly, the goal of the present invention is to tag a specific semantic meaning, i.e., a semantic event S_(E) such as “wedding” and “birthday”, to a specific event E_(t) and to the image records correspond to the event.

It will be assumed that semantic events are generated by concurrent visual concepts like “people”, “park” and “flowers”, wherein C₁, . . . ,C_(N) denote N visual concepts. Using the above-described semantic concept detectors, twenty-one (N=21) SVM based concept detectors are preferably developed using low-level color, texture, and edge visual features over the applied dataset. These semantic concept detectors can be applied to generate twenty-one individual concept scores p(C₁, I_(i) ^(t)), . . . , p(C_(N), I_(i) ^(t)) for each image I_(i) ^(t). These concept scores are then utilized to form a feature vector to represent image I_(i) ^(t) in the concept space as: f(I_(i) ^(t))=[p(C₁, I_(i) ^(t)), . . . , p(C_(N), I_(i) ^(t))]^(T) as will be described in greater detail.

Since a video segment from real consumers usually has diverse visual content from one long shot, each video V_(j) ^(t) is preferably partitioned into a set of segments V_(j,1) ^(t), . . . ,V_(j,m) _(j) ^(t), with each segment having a given length (for example five seconds). The keyframes are then uniformly periodically sampled from the video segments (for example every half second). For example, let I_(j,k,l) ^(t) be the l-th keyframe in the k-th segment V_(j,k) ^(t), then I_(j,k,l) ^(t) can also be represented by a feature vector f(I_(j,k,l) ^(t)) in the concept space in the same manner as a digital still image. It will be understood that different sampling rates may be readily employed than those illustrated above.

Both digital still images and video segments can be defined as data points represented by x. For example, event E_(t) contains m^(t)=m_(p) ^(t)+{tilde over (m)}_(v) ^(t) data points in total, where {tilde over (m)}_(v) ^(t) is the entire number of video segments from the m_(v) ^(t) video clips in E_(t). Semantic event detection is then performed based on these data points and the corresponding feature vectors developed from the concept scores.

The BOF representation has been proven effective for detecting generic concepts for images. See, for example, J. Sivic and A. Zisserman, “Video google: a text retrieval approach to object matching in videos”, ICCV, pp 1470-1477, 2003, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference. In BOF, images are represented by a set of orderless local descriptors. Through clustering techniques, a middle-level visual vocabulary is constructed where each visual word is formed by a group of local descriptors. Each visual word is considered as a robust and denoised visual term for describing images.

For example, let S_(E) denote a semantic event, e.g. “wedding”, and let E₁, . . . ,E_(M) denote M events containing this semantic event. Each E_(t) is formed by m_(p) ^(t) photos and {tilde over (m)}_(v) ^(t) video segments. Similar to the visual vocabulary, a concept vocabulary can be constructed by clustering these

$\sum\limits_{t = 1}^{M}m^{t}$ (where m^(t)=m_(p) ^(t)+{tilde over (m)}_(v) ^(t)) data points into n concept words. Each concept word can be treated as a pattern of concept concurrences that is a common character for describing all the events containing S_(E). Specifically, to accommodate both still video images and video data points, a spectral clustering algorithm (See, for example, A. Y. Ng, M. Jordan, and Y. Weiss, “On spectral clustering: analysis and an algorithm,” Advances in NIPS, 2001, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.) is adopted to construct the concept vocabulary based on pairwise similarities measured by the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), which is described in Y. Rubner, C. Tomasi, and L. Guibas, “The earth mover's distance as a metric for image retrieval,” IJCV, 2000, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference.

Each data point is treated as a set of images, i.e., one image for a still video image and multiple images for a video segment. Then EMD is used to measure the similarity between two data points (image sets). There are many ways to compute the distance between two image sets, e.g. the maximum/minimum/mean distance between images in these two sets. These methods are easily influenced by noisy outlier images, while EMD provides a more robust distance metric. EMD finds a minimum weighted distance among all pairwise distances between two image sets subject to weight-normalization constraints, and allows partial match between data points and can alleviate the influence of outlier images.

The EMD between two data points is calculated as follows. Assume that there are n₁ and n₂ images in data points x₁ and x₂, respectively. The EMD between x₁ and x₂ is a linear combination of ground distance d(I_(p) ¹, I_(q) ²) weighted by flow f(I_(p) ¹, I_(q) ²) between any two images I_(p) ¹ ε x₁, I_(q) ² ε x₂.

$\begin{matrix} {{D\left( {x_{1},x_{2}} \right)} = \frac{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}{{d\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}}}}{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}}}} & (1) \end{matrix}$ where an optimal flow matrix f(I_(p) ¹, I_(q) ²) is obtained from the following linear program:

$\min{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}{{d\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}}}}$ w.r.t f(I_(p)¹, I_(q)²), 1 ≤ p ≤ n₁, 1 ≤ q ≤ n₂ where w_(p) ¹ and w_(q) ² are weights of

${{s.t.\mspace{11mu}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}} \geq 0},{{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}} \leq w_{p}^{1}},{{{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}} \leq {w_{q}^{2}{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}{f\left( {I_{p}^{1},I_{q}^{2}} \right)}}}}} = {\min\left\{ {{\sum\limits_{p = 1}^{n_{1}}w_{p}^{1}},{\sum\limits_{q = 1}^{n_{2}}w_{q}^{2}}} \right\}}}$ image I_(p) ¹ and I_(q) ² in data points x₁ and x₂, respectively. Here we take equal weights: w_(p) ¹=1/n₁, w_(q) ²=1/n₂. The Euclidean distance over concept score features is used as the distance d(I_(p) ¹,I_(q) ²). From Eq(1), EMD finds the best matching image pairs in two data points. The weight normalization constraints ensure that each image has enough matches in the other set. When both x₁ and x₂ are photos, the EMD is just the Euclidean distance. The pairwise EMD is then converted to the pairwise similarity by a Gaussian function: S(x₁, x₂)=exp(−D(x₁, x₂)/r), where r is the mean of all pairwise distances between all training data points.

Spectral clustering as mentioned above is a technique for finding groups in data sets consisting of similarities between pairs of data points. Here the algorithm developed in Ng et al. is adopted and can be described as follows. Given the similarity matrix S(x_(i), x_(j)):

-   -   Get affine matrix A_(ij)=S(x_(i), x_(j)), if i≠j, and A_(ii)=0.     -   Define diagonal matrix

$D_{ii} = {{\sum\limits_{j}{{A_{ij}.\mspace{11mu}{Get}}\mspace{14mu} L}} = {D^{{- 1}/2}{{AD}^{{- 1}/2}.}}}$

-   -   Find eigenvectors u₁, . . . ,u_(n) of L corresponding to the n         largest eigenvalues, and get U=[u₁, . . . ,u_(n)], where n is         determined by the energy ratio of eigenvalues to keep.     -   Get matrix V from U by re-normalizing U's rows to have unit         length.     -   Treat each row in V as a point in R^(n) (the i-th row         corresponding to the original i-th data point), and cluster all         the points into n clusters via the K-means algorithm.

Each data cluster obtained by the spectral clustering algorithm is called a concept word, and all the clusters form a concept vocabulary to represent and detect semantic events. Let W_(j) ^(i) denote the j-th word learned for semantic event S_(Ei), S(x,W_(j) ^(i)) denote the similarity of data x to word W_(j) ^(i) calculated as the maximum similarity between x and the member data points in W_(j) ^(i): S(x,W_(j) ^(i))=max_(x) _(k) _(εW) _(j) _(i) S(x_(k), x), where S(x_(k), x) is defined in the same way as described above. For each data x, vector [S(x, W₁ ^(i)), . . . , S(x, W_(n) ^(i))]^(T) can be treated as a BOF feature vector for x. Assume that event E_(t) contains m^(t) data points, and based on above BOF feature vectors, event E_(t) can also be represented by a BOF feature vector f_(bof)(E_(t)) as: f_(bof)(E_(t))=[max_(xεE) _(t) S(x, W₁ ^(i)), . . . , max_(xεE) _(t) S(x, W_(n) ^(i))]^(T). Finally, using the BOF feature f_(bof) a binary one-vs.-all SVM classifier can be learned to detect semantic event S_(Ei).

Referring now to FIG. 1, a system 100 for semantic event detection for digital content records according to an embodiment of the present invention is illustrated. The system 100 includes a data processing unit 110, a peripheral unit 120, a user interface unit 130, and a memory unit 140. The memory unit 140, the peripheral unit 120, and the user interface unit 130 are communicatively connected to the data processing system 110.

The data processing system 110 includes one or more data processing devices that implement the processes of the various embodiments of the present invention, including the example processes of FIGS. 2-4 described herein. The phrases “data processing device” or “data processor” are intended to include any type of data processing device, such as a central processing unit (“CPU”), a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a mainframe computer, a personal digital assistant, a Blackberry™, a digital camera, cellular phone, or any other device for processing data, managing data, or handling data, whether implemented with electrical, magnetic, optical, biological components, or otherwise.

The memory unit 140 includes one or more memory devices configured to store information, including the information needed to execute the processes of the various embodiments of the present invention, including the example processes of FIGS. 2-4 described herein. The memory unit 140 may be a distributed processor-accessible memory system including multiple processor-accessible memories communicatively connected to the data processing system 110 via a plurality of computers and/or devices. On the other hand, the memory unit 140 need not be a distributed processor-accessible memory system and, consequently, may include one or more processor-accessible memories located within a single data processor or device. Further, the phrase “memory unit” is intended to include any processor-accessible data storage device, whether volatile or nonvolatile, electronic, magnetic, optical, or otherwise, including but not limited to, floppy disks, hard disks, Compact Discs, DVDs, flash memories, ROMs, and RAMs or any other digital storage medium.

The phrase “communicatively connected” is intended to include any type of connection, whether wired or wireless, between devices, data processors, or programs in which data may be communicated. Further, the phrase “communicatively connected” is intended to include a connection between devices or programs within a single data processor, a connection between devices or programs located in different data processors, and a connection between devices not located in data processors at all. In this regard, although the memory unit 140 is shown separately from the data processing system 110, one skilled in the art will appreciate that the memory unit 140 may be implemented completely or partially within the data processing system 110. Further in this regard, although the peripheral system 120 and the user interface system 130 are shown separately from the data processing system 110, one skilled in the art will appreciate that one or both of such systems may be implemented completely or partially within the data processing system 110.

The peripheral system 120 may include one or more devices configured to provide digital content records to the data processing system 110. For example, the peripheral system 120 may include digital video cameras, cellular phones, regular digital cameras, or other data processors. In addition, the peripheral system 120 may include the necessary equipment, devices, circuitry, etc. to connect the data processing system 110 to remote sources of data. For example, the system 100 may be linked via the Internet to servers upon which datasets are stored. The datasets may include datasets of digital content records used to train the system 100 or datasets including digital content records that are to be analyzed by the system 100. The data processing system 110, upon receipt of digital content records from a device in the peripheral system 120, may store such digital content records in the processor-accessible memory system 140 for future processing or, if sufficient processing power is available, analyze the digital content records in real time as a received data stream.

The user interface system 130 may include a mouse, a keyboard, another computer, or any device or combination of devices from which data is input to the data processing system 110. In this regard, although the peripheral system 120 is shown separately from the user interface system 130, the peripheral system 120 may be included as part of the user interface system 130.

The user interface system 130 also may include a display device, a processor-accessible memory, or any device or combination of devices to which data is output by the data processing system 110. In this regard, if the user interface system 130 includes a processor-accessible memory, such memory may be part of the memory unit 140 even though the user interface system 130 and the memory unit 140 are shown separately in FIG. 1.

The basic operation of the system will now be described with reference to FIG. 2, which is a flow diagram illustrating processing modules that are implemented by one or more of the units illustrated in FIG. 1. It will be understood that the processing modules contain instructions that are implemented by one or more of the units provided in system 100. In the illustrated example, a new event (E₀) is provided to the system 100 via a data entry module 200, where it is desired that the probability that E₀ belongs to a specific semantic event be determined. For example, based on operator instructions received via the user interface unit 130, the data processing unit 110 controls the operation of the peripheral unit 120 to download the data corresponding to E₀ into the memory unit 140. Each event contains a plurality of digital content records, in the illustrated example still digital images m_(0,p) and video segments m_(0,v), that are grouped together according to capture time and color similarity utilizing the previously described clustering method. The clustering method can be applied to a dataset of still digital images and video segments prior to submission to the system 100. Alternatively, the dataset can be provided to the system 100 and the data entry module 200 can perform the clustering operation as one operational element of the data processing unit 110 in order to generate E₀.

For example, a consumer may capture a dataset consisting of one hundred digital still images and videos of a plurality of different events using an electronic camera. A memory card from the electronic camera is provided to a card reader unit as part of the peripheral unit 120. In response to control instructions entered by a user via the user interface unit 130, the data processing unit 110 controls the operation of the peripheral unit 120 to download the dataset from the memory card to the memory unit 140. The data processing unit 110 then proceeds to perform the clustering algorithm on the dataset in order to group the digital still images and videos into a plurality of clusters that correspond to the plurality of events. Thus, the functions of the instructions provided within the data entry module 200 are completed and a number of digital still images and videos (for example 10 out of the original 100) are identified as being associated with E₀. At this point, although ten digital still images and videos have been associated with E₀, E₀ has yet to be associated with a particular semantic event such as “wedding”.

A visual feature extraction module 210 is then utilized to obtain keyframes from the video segments in E₀ and to extract visual features from both the keyframes and the digital still images contained in E₀. In the illustrated example, the visual feature extraction module 210 determines grid-based color moments, Gabor texture and edge directional histogram for each of the digital still images and videos. It will be understood, however, that other visual features may be readily employed other than those utilized in the illustrated example.

The data processing unit 110 performs the necessary keyframe and visual feature extraction utilizing conventional techniques on each of the digital still images and videos contained with E₀ in accordance with the instructions provided within the visual feature extraction module 210. Accordingly, three visual feature representations of each of ten digital still images and videos corresponding to E₀ are now available for further analysis.

The three visual features extracted by the feature extraction module 210 are utilized by a concept detection module 220 to generate concept scores reflective of the probability that a particular keyframe or still digital image is related to a specific semantic event. The concept detection module 220 preferably determines the concept scores using a two step process. First, a concept score detection module 222 is provided that utilizes twenty-one of the above-described SVM semantic concept detectors (implemented by the data processing unit 110) to generate a concept score based on each individual classifier in each visual feature space for each digital still image and keyframe. Second, the individual concept scores are then fused by a fusion module 224 (implemented by the data processing unit 110) to generate an ensemble concept detection score for a particular digital still image or keyframe, thereby reducing the amount of data to be further processed.

In a preferred embodiment, the fusion module 224 first normalizes the different classification outputs from different features by a sigmoid function 1/(1+exp(−D)) where D is the output of the SVM classifier representing the distance to the decision boundary. Fusion is accomplished by taking the average of the classification outputs from the different visual features for each of the twenty-one concepts to generate the ensemble concept detection score.

In a simplified example, three concepts “people”, “park” and “flowers” will be discussed. Concept scores for “people”, “park” and “flowers” are generated for each of the three visual feature representations of each of the ten images of E_(0.) For example, the color feature representation of a first image in the group of ten images may have a 90% probability of containing people, a 5% probability of containing a park and a 5% probability of containing flowers, the texture feature representation of the first image has a 5% probability of containing people, an 80% probability of containing a park, and a 15% probability of containing flowers, and the edge detection feature of the first image has a 10% probability of containing people, an 50% probability of containing a park, and a 40% probability of containing flowers.

Given three visual feature representations of ten images, thirty sets of concept scores would be generated (one for each visual feature representation) with each set containing three individual concept scores (one for “people”, one for “park” and one for “flowers”). In order to generate an ensemble concept score for the first image, the probabilities for each of the concepts for each of the visual representations is averaged, such that the ensemble concept score for the first image would be 35% probability of containing people (average of the people probabilities for color 90%, texture 5% and edge 5%), a 30% probability of containing a park (average of the park probabilities for color 5%, texture 80% and edge 5%), and a 20% probability of containing flowers (average of the flowers probabilities for color 5%, texture 15% and edge 40%).

The ensemble concept scores are subsequently provided to a BOF module 230 which determines a BOF vector for E₀. The BOF feature vector for E₀ is obtained by first determining individual feature vectors for each of the digital still images and video segments contained within E₀ using the ensemble concept score of each respective digital still image and video segment. In the preferred embodiment, each digital still image or video segment is treated as a data point, and a pairwise similarity between the ensemble concept score of each data point in E₀ and the ensemble concept score of each predetermined positive training data point for a given semantic event (SE), for example “wedding”, is then calculated by a similarity detection module 232 using EMD. Effectively, an individual feature vector is obtained for each of the digital still images and video segments contained in E₀. A mapping module 234 is then used to map each of the individual feature vectors of E₀ to a codebook of semantic events (previously developed during a training process described in greater detail below), and an event feature vector for E₀ is generated based on the mapped similarities.

The event feature vector can now be supplied to a classifier module 240. In the illustrated example, the classifier module 240 is utilizes a SVM classifier to generate an event detection score for E₀. The event detection score represents a final probability that the new event E₀ corresponds to a given semantic event such as “wedding”. The event detection score is then preferably compared with a predetermined threshold to determine if E₀ should be categorized as a wedding event. The predetermined threshold may be varied depending on the level of accuracy required by the system 100 in a given application.

Once E₀ has been proper categorized, the still digital images and video segments corresponding to E₀ can be tagged with the appropriate semantic event classifier and sorted into appropriate album folders or files and stored in the memory unit 140 for later retrieval. Alternatively, the tagged still digital images and video segments can be written to an image storage medium via the peripheral unit 120. The tagging of the still digital images and video segments with semantic event classifiers provides an additional advantage of enabling the images and video segments to be easily retrieved by search engines.

Training of the system 100 will now be described with reference to FIG. 3 First, T positive training events E₁, . . . ,E_(T) are entered using the data entry module 200. Each event E_(t) contains m_(t,p) photos and m_(t,v) videos grouped together according to capture time and color similarity by the previously described clustering method. The visual extraction module 210 is then used to extract keyframes from video segments, and visual features are extracted from both the keyframes and the digital still images. As in the case of the operation described above, the visual features include grid-based color moments, Gabor texture and edge directional histogram. The concept detection module 220 is then used to generate the ensemble concept scores for the keyframes and the digital images as discussed above.

A BOF learning module 250 is then employed to train the system 100. First, each digital image or video segment is treated as a data point and a pairwise similarity between each pair of data points is calculated by EMD using the similarity detection module 232 previously described. Based on the pairwise similarity matrix, a spectral clustering module 252 is used to apply spectral clustering to group the data points into different clusters, with each clustering corresponding to one code word. To train a classifier for detecting semantic event SE, all training events E_(i) (E_(i) contains both positive training events and negative training events for SE) are mapped to the above codebook to generate a BOF feature vectors for each training event by a mapping module 254. Based on the BOF feature vectors, a classifier training module 260 is used to train a binary SVM classifier to detect a specific semantic event SE.

FIG. 4 depicts the details of the training process for the video concept detectors utilized in the concept score detection module 222. For a concept C, N positive training videos from a benchmark consumer video data set are provided via the data entry module 200. Keyframes are obtained from videos and visual features are extracted from the keyframes as in the prior examples utilizing the visual feature extraction module 210. The visual features include grid-based color moments, Gabor texture and edge directional histogram. A concept training module 270 is then used to train the concept detectors. Namely, based on each type of visual feature, each keyframe is represented as a feature vector, and a binary SVM classifier is trained to detect concept C. The discriminant function of these classifiers over individual types of features are averaged together to generate the ensemble concept detector for concept C.

Testing of the above described semantic detection system and method was conducted by evaluating 1972 consumer events from Kodak's consumer dataset, which are labeled to 10 different semantic events whose detailed definitions are shown in the table provided in FIG. 5. A total of 1261 events were randomly selected for training, and the rest were used for testing. The training and testing data was partitioned at the macro-event level, i.e., events from the same macro-event were treated together as training or testing data. This avoids the situation where similar events from the same macro-event are separated, which will simplify the classification problem.

Average precision (AP) was used as the performance metric, which Has been used as an official metric for video concept detection. See, for example, Nist, “Tree video retrieval evaluation (treevid),” 2001-2006, www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/treevid. It calculates the average of precision values at different recall points on the precision-recall curve, and thus evaluates the effectiveness of a classifier in detecting a specific semantic event. When multiple semantic events are considered, the mean of APs (MAP) is used.

To show the effectiveness of the concept score representation in the semantic event detection algorithm, an experiment was done to compare the inventive method and the approach where the BOF feature vectors are constructed based on original low-level visual features. Specifically, the same low-level visual features were used as described in S. F. Chang et al. described above. FIG. 6 gives the performance comparison. As shown in FIG. 6, both methods consistently outperform random guess. SE detection with concept scores, however, significantly outperforms SE detection with low-level features in terms of AP over most concepts and by 20.7% in terms of MAP. This result confirms the power of using previous concept detection models to help detect semantic events.

A second experiment was conducted to compare event-level versus image-level representations. In this experiment, a comparison was made between the semantic detection method of the present invention (SEDetection) with two other detectors: (1) a baseline event detector (baseline), and (2) an SVM detector using image-level concept score representation directly (SVM-Direct). FIG. 7 gives AP comparison of the different methods. As shown, the proposed SEDetection performs the best over most of the semantic events and gets significant performance improvement of more than 20% compared with the second best method, over many semantic events like “wedding”, “Christmas”, and “school activity”. This result confirms the success of the event-level BOF representation. Additionally, FIG. 8 gives a comparison of the number of support vectors from different algorithms. Generally, the less the support vectors the simpler the decision boundary. From the figure, decision boundaries are significantly simplified by event-level representation where SVM classifiers can separate semantic events quite well. Furthermore, a comparison of the top-5 detected events for “animal” by the baseline detector and SEDetection showed that the SEDetection method can achieve 100% precision, while the image-based SVM-Direct method only gets 20% precision.

It is to be understood that the exemplary embodiment(s) is/are merely illustrative of the present invention and that many variations of the above-described embodiment(s) can be devised by one skilled in the art without departing from the scope of the invention. It is therefore intended that all such variations be included within the scope of the following claims and their equivalents. 

1. A method for facilitating semantic event classification of a group of image records related to an event, the method comprising: extracting a plurality of visual features from each of the image records; generating a plurality of concept scores for each of the image records using the visual features, wherein each concept score corresponds to a visual concept and each concept score is indicative of a probability that the image record includes the visual concept; producing a codebook of semantic events by determining a pairwise similarity between pairs of data points corresponding to training events and applying spectral clustering to group the data points into different clusters with each cluster corresponding to one code word, based on the determined pairwise similarities; mapping the training events to the codebook to generate a Bag-of-Features (BOF) feature vector corresponding to each training event; training an event classifier based on the BOF features vectors corresponding to the training events; generating a feature vector corresponding to the event based on the concept scores of the image records; i) wherein the generation of the feature vector includes calculating a pairwise similarity between the concept scores of the image records and concept scores for predetermined training data points to generate individual feature vectors for each of the image records; and ii) mapping the individual feature vectors to the codebook of semantic events; and supplying the feature vector to the event classifier that identifies at least one semantic event.
 2. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 1, wherein the image records include at least one digital still image and at least one video segment.
 3. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 2, wherein the extracting of a plurality of visual features includes extracting a keyframe from the at least one video segment and extracting the plurality of visual features from both the keyframe and the at least one digital still image.
 4. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 3, wherein the generation of the concept scores includes generating initial concept scores for each keyframe and each digital still image corresponding to each of the extracted visual features.
 5. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 4, wherein the generation of the concept scores further includes generating an ensemble concept score for each keyframe and each digital still image based on the initial concept scores.
 6. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 5, wherein the ensemble concept scores are generated by fusing individual concept scores for each extracted visual feature for a given keyframe or a given digital still image.
 7. A method for facilitating semantic event classification as claimed in claim 1, further comprising tagging each of the image records with the event classifier. 